Turn the Ship Around: Leaders, Not Followers

Katya chose the book: for six months she had been preoccupied with the nature of leadership - how it appears and what environment grows strong leaders. Its theses reached her through the Twitter recommendation feed - delegating authority, growing team competence, focusing on your own team and your own supports - and after that tweet she went looking for what had actually happened. Alexander had heard of the book but only opened it once she picked it: he found the author's talk at Google, where authors are invited soon after publication to retell the main ideas in 45-50 minutes. He posted a short review in his Telegram channel and concluded the book had to be read. Katya, in her previous role, owned an area covering internal communications and HR marketing, came into it from computer science and has now returned to a technical product manager role.

The book has layers: the story of how it all began, then a model in three parts - control, competence and clarity - and, as Alexander notes, events on the boat unfolded in exactly that order. Katya states the underlying problem: classic structures rest on the hierarchy of I speak, you do, so the manager becomes a bottleneck holding all the context for every decision. With five reports that still stays afloat; with fifty and more it does not, and David proposes delegating everything that can be delegated while staying empathetic towards people. Alexander adds that early on David draws examples from a leadership manual he took to be a naval one, built on the same pyramid, and sees a familiar plot: a strong engineer takes over a cross-functional team without knowing how to automate testing or roll out infrastructure. He himself was born 38 years ago in Severodvinsk, where submarines are assembled and repaired, and remembers from excursions how little room there is: coordination is needed simply to avoid killing each other.

Every chapter ends with a list of what not to do and what to do instead. Katya turned those lists into small notes, and Alexander suggested reading them as a trigger for self-reflection: check how you act and how your managers do. Towards the end the book folds everything into a table of leader-follower against leader-leader, which works as a questionnaire - mark your habits in red and green, then dig into the red ones. From the right-hand column Katya singles out curiosity, an interest in how processes work and what background shaped people's habits, and conversation: talking to people was what she considered her most effective management tool. Alexander had not thought in terms of that table; he prefers the three categories of advice and warns against delegation without prerequisites - a person has a zone of proximal development, and the question is how much of your support they will need.

Curiosity is needed inside teams too: on the boats where David served before the Santa Fe it did not work, because in a rigid hierarchy people answer that responsibility is yours and you should just say what to do. What is needed is an internal demand for growth and for the shared goal, the old parable of digging a hole against building a temple. The people this worked with grew through hard tasks, while those who did not want it stayed where automatic promotions end. Asked by Katya about soft skills against technical depth, Alexander answers that the hardest case is an engineer carrying both management and engineering: you end up asking them to pick a chair - an identity crisis. He grew people by discussing a problem, suggesting something to read and unpacking the case one-to-one a week later. As a lead of leads, Katya saw her job as creating context in both directions: an idea stated once still has to be repeated on internal broadcasts, drawn as a banner, underlined for months. That is why Alexander started his channel: the message needs a carrier that works without you.

For David, control is not monitoring, reports and pointless data gathering but the development of processes - a pure product approach, as Katya calls it: metrics, hypotheses, research, iterations and measurements. In hiring that meant surveying every candidate about the interview sections and monitoring how initiatives moved the key metrics. Alexander recalls online acquisition, where statistics abound - by his rough reckoning hundreds of thousands of clients pass through a test; with a crew of roughly 135 you cannot run that experiment, but you can watch parameters. David had one: three sailors out of 135 re-signed their contract during a combat deployment, and after the changes it was 35 or 36. The metric matters: a contract signed at sea exempts a sailor from tax, and people leave a bad boat. On team process metrics Alexander recently wrote a post about Alexey Pimenov's book on the kanban method. The point is to control the system, not people. The flip side is that metrics get gamed: the crew prepared for inspections instead of the mission, and in companies fond of green a third of every quarter goes on repainting the traffic light.

David added clarity by changing the goal: people avoided mistakes for the sake of the audits, and he explained that the audit is secondary - strive for excellence and inspections become an easy walk. He suggests changing behaviour first rather than mindset, letting the model follow. Katya recalls being pleased by praise in her first reviews, while what proved useful was harsh criticism, and the commander set the crew the same frame. Competence starts with a ban on ready answers: if a solution appears whenever someone walks in, nobody learns, so the message is to learn to fish. Hence the author's advice - set goals rather than methods, repeat your message, and instead of a briefing give a practical task and watch how it is done. Alexander had just been discussing Kolb's cycle with the internal training team while preparing a replacement for an architecture course. On the boat this rested on documentation and on a reader inventing a test for his crewmates, whereas in companies you are lucky if the wiki is under half a year stale. At the end Alexander explains why the experiment happened at all: a superior who wanted the changes sent David to the worst boat, and a low base is hard to make worse.